My first time in San Francisco was a tale from Edgar Allan Poe. I spent the entire night trying to entice the household cats to sit on me (Poe was so poor he  tried to keep his ill wife warm using that method). It was only later I discovered Mark Twain’s wry observation that the coldest winter he’d ever known was a summer in San Francisco. Testify! This time I was more prepared. The trusty puffer jacket conveniently manifested in the middle aisle of Aldi just before my departure for the States. It was a great comfort as I waited in the icy wind  blowing up from Union Square for the tour bus that never arrived . No Muir Woods for me, then.

Fortunately, Rashida had called me out on my punk posing. Who was I kidding? I’ve always been more hippie than punk. Of course , I went to City Lights Bookstore and gloried in the cultural history I’ve loved since my undergraduate days. Oh, the poet’s room. Oh the joy of small scale, personal, funky book shops. Shoutout to Rabble Books, Crow Books, New Editions that supply the same kind of soul nourishment to writers ✍️ and readers in my hometown. 

A couple of years back I amused myself by entitling a poem “Hiss” in a cryptic micro-homage to Ginsberg’s “Howl”. It was published in Verseville.www.verseville.org/liana-joy-christensen.html

On the way back to my eyrie, I spoke briefly with Terry Williams who was standing in the boarded-up doorway of his burned out home. I said I was so sorry and asked if it was okay to take the following pictures. He gave his permission and went back to speaking with some neighbours. 

In this city of poets, Terry Williams stood his ground with clear dignity, calling to mind Leonard Cohen’s lines

Four hours sleep. Four am arising. Meditated, then left the hotel in the darkness of 5.00 am to catch the bus (I’d done  a trial run in daylight the day before). Instant, albeit transient, intimacy with the bus driver: a big, cheerful, chatty black man whose shift was just about to end. No sleep for him: he was going to an event at his sixteen year old son’s school and had prepared his legendary pulled pork, per request of his son’s schoolmates. I suggested I might change my plans for the day and come with him, which elicited a belly laugh. The trip took ten minutes during which time we covered wills, families (he had four children, two boys, two girls, two left, two still at home). His wife was a legal secretary and they looked forward to paying off their mortgage in a few years, after which he’d love to retire to Costa Rica. I know his  grandmother was one of thirteen, who in her turn had eleven children. He knows I live in my husband’s grandmother’s home by the ocean. They had will problems. He knows I have two brothers and one of the enduring gifts of our life is that we did not have will problems! He was proud of himself for talking a friend out of becoming a cop, because “you know that George Floyd guy? [Oh, yes 😢] Well, it was not a great time to become a cop”. His friend had taken the advice and he was glad.  How vivid a few moments can be.

Le dejeuner sur l’herbe may appear simple enough, but hear me out. The first time I came to the States I was paralysed by the sheer range of product choices in the supermarket and at Subways. Made me long for the Soviet-style simplicity of the old Action supermarket in Hilton. And as my friend Jenny will testify, I lasted two nanoseconds in Walmart. I made it past the door greeter when something like an anti-capitalist forcefield propelled me backwards and (to quote Monty Python) I bravely turned my tail and fled. So fast forward to yesterday when our rather regimented tour guide was very particular about being on time. We were dropped at a supermarket with a strictly limited schedule and told to buy food for the day. (In fairness, it was good advice to avoid queuing in the Park.) It felt like some kind of vanilla “Hunger Games” as I grabbed a basket and bolted round the aisles. Organic greens, Kerry Gold butter, fresh berries and cottage cheese, a peach, tomatoes, non-earwax cheese, organic ginger Kombucha. A modest victory for Australian tastes. I’d like to think I made Maggie Beer proud.

My rustic ​picnic was within sight and sound of Yosemite Falls … at 1000 m  the second tallest fall in the world. So the first of my double jeopardies was the repeated refrain on loop in my brain: don’t go chasing waterfalls. Given that it is perhaps the single most important reason people travel to Yosemite, I was always going to defy the interdict. Plus, I particularly owe it to my niece Janice to enjoy them on her behalf as well as my own (she is a dedicated waterfall-chaser).

As an environmentalist I am compelled by the stories of John Muir and the Buffalo Soldiers who were the precursors of today’s National Park rangers. But I cannot allow that story to erase other people’s history. https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/339
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Given the impossibly compromised nature of everything, I found myself feeling more and more mutinous as I was herded from one photo opportunity to the next. All day I was thinking of a poem I misremembered as being by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out it was his fellow Beat poet, Gregory Corso. Although even as a starry-eyed undergraduate I would love to have possessed the power to permanently expunge the misogynistic final stanza of “Marriage”, I’ve always loved the rest of the poem, and the excerpt below captures in more exuberant tones my  growing desire to quietly defy what is expected of me.

So, in the city  of Beat poets, is it more punk to visit or refrain from visiting the City Light Bookstore?

A slow day in this light-drenched room. I was glad of the chance to wash my hair, wash my clothes. Dancing by myself in tiny spaces conjured all the zoom classes of the year of the plague.

Late in the day I ventured out in this seemingly mellow neighbourhood and walked straight by another person’s tragedy. Police, fire trucks, and the burnt hulk of a beautiful Victorian dwelling. Yellow tape. Bystanders and neighbours gathered in huddles. The juxtaposition was just as Auden (and the Old Masters) observed: incommensurable. It could have been a film set. It was not. The likelihood of it being a race-based hate crime is high. The history is ugly /missionlocal.org/2024/05/fire-chars-home-of-black-dog-walker-earlier-targeted-by-racist-threats/

Or for that matter where am I?  Unwritten tales from Cambodia are vivid in my mind’s eye. Time and fate twist and slip through my fingers. What follows cannot be a full account.

Twenty minutes to the airport: something to be said for a godawful o’clock departure. I fell through space and landed in an enchanted garden. Once there were butterflies.

An old habit from the days of lessons with Tessa at World’s End Studio: my journal entries begin with the date in Spanish. Time is neither linear, nor inexhaustible. To drive this new device is painstaking. I’m alone and it’s taken me hours. Once I’m caught up in the whirl, transmissions will be intermittent. But my love is a steady pulse. You can tune in to it anytime, anywhere.